Some file managers provide network connectivity via protocols, such as FTP, HTTP, NFS, SMB or WebDAV. This is achieved by allowing the user to browse for a file server (connecting and accessing the server's file system like a local file system) or by providing its own full client implementations for file server protocols.
Directory editors
[edit]A term that predates[citation needed] the usage of file manager is directory editor. An early directory editor, DIRED, was developed circa 1974 at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Stan Kugell.[5][6]
A directory editor was written for EXEC 8 at the University of Maryland, and was available to other users at that time. The term was used by other developers, including Jay Lepreau, who wrote the dired program in 1980,[7] which ran on BSD. This was in turn inspired by an older program with the same name running on TOPS-20. Dired inspired other programs, including dired, the editor script (for emacs and similar editors), and ded. [8]
One such file manager was neptune. It ran on the Xerox Alto in the 1973-1974 time frame. It had some of the same features that would end up in orthodox file managers.
Another such file manager is flist, which was introduced sometime before 1980 on the Conversational Monitor System.[9][10][11] This is a variant of FULIST, which originated before late 1978, according to comments by its author, Theo Alkema.[12]
The flist program provided a list of files in the user's minidisk,[13] and allowed sorting by any file attribute. The file attributes could be passed to scripts or function-key definitions, making it simple to use flist as part of CMS EXEC, EXEC 2 or XEDIT scripts.